The building of giant tires is entirely different from building the ordinary and relatively more familiar tires used on vehicles which travel over paved highways or streets. The term "giant tire" as used in the present specification means not only tires of great size but also of constructions adapted for use on off-the-road equipment such as earthmovers, and the like. By way of illustration, the apparatus about to be described is adapted to construct tires having bead diameters from 39 inches to 69 inches and in which the band width measured from edge to edge of the ply from which the band is formed may be as much as 220 inches and the circumference of the band before the same is expanded into its final tire shape, may range from 164 inches to 290 inches. While earthmover tires approaching such size have previously been built, the successive plies have been built conventionally either directly upon a carcass-forming drum or on the rotatable surface of a band builder. In both cases, each successive portion of ply stock was required to be positioned by hand and spliced by hand. These operations required not only great physical effort by the tire builder, but made the accurate repetition of successive operations extremely difficult.